Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Final Paper: Workshop on Thursday

In Seminar hour on Thursday we will have a workshop in preparation for the Term Essay. We will divide into groups of those who have and those who have not decided upon a thesis and exchange ideas and strategies. I will be providing suggestions, advice and provisional approval.

The paragraph below is the conclusion from one of our mid-term papers, and I include it here, with permission, because it shows very effectively how a concluding paragraph can broaden out from the specific thesis argued in the essay to a stimulating related point for further schoalrly research.

In this particular case, the application borders on the insolent.

Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and selections of Goethe’s writings both detail how the microcosm and the macrocosm are apparent separately but also combined in nature. As enumerated in this essay, the observation of nature connects us with not only ourselves and our perceptions, but with the divine as well. We must use our senses of sight and hearing to allow nature her luminance and voice if she is to reveal to us the true quality of the divine. This essay explicated the contextual meanings of the microcosm and the macrocosm, the divine, the particular and the general, and others to show how Blake’s and Goethe’s ideas of nature are fundamentally the same. Personally, however, the opening quadruplet of Auguries of Innocence raises even more questions: if a world is in one grain of sand, does that mean there are millions of different worlds in all the grains of sand? Similarly, if a heaven is in one flower, are there many heavens to be found in all flowers? These questions seem to cross the line into the unknown, the unanswerable. I choose to believe that once we have found our individual versions of the divine in nature ­our own personal world or heaven ­then any questions we have will become irrelevant.